Various sports, such as amateur wrestling, require the participant athletes to wear protective headgear. This headgear, as in the case of wrestling, typically offers minimal protection to the wearer's ears against impact, snagging, or rubbing, but offers little to no protection from impact and abrasive injuries to the frontal, rear, or temple areas of the head.
Other sports, such as girls and youth soccer, do not currently require any sort of protective headgear, but the players would benefit greatly from wearing some sort of head-impact protection as many players are suffering head injuries in these sports.
Various types of protective headgear have been developed in the current state of the art to address the need for protective headgear. Most solutions focus on protecting only the ears themselves, and seek to accomplish this by encasing hard ear cups in foam padding attached by a strap system.
Other solutions attempt to address the problem of preventing concussive injuries. Current attempts in the art address this problem with large, bulky, foam pads. These pads are cumbersome for the wearer, often need to incorporate additional, embedded plastic ear cups, and tend to breed bacteria because they do not allow the skin to breath.
Furthermore, current solutions tend to sacrifice the wearer's ability to hear in their attempts to provide protection.
Information relevant to attempts to address the problems found in the current state of the art, as described above, can be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,882,205 and 6,715,156, as well as in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/272,577. However, each one of these references suffers from one or more of the following disadvantages: it does not address the issue of ear and concussion protection, they are not washable or anti-microbial, they are heavy and bulky, and they obscure the wearer's hearing.
It would, therefore, be desirable to have an apparatus for protecting the wearer from head injuries during sporting activities that provides for ear and concussion protection, that is washable and anti-microbial, that is light and compact, that is adjustable and customizable, and that allows for improved hearing by the wearer.
While certain aspects of conventional technologies have been discussed to facilitate disclosure of the invention, Applicant in no way disclaims these technical aspects, and it is contemplated that the claimed invention may encompass one or more of the conventional technical aspects discussed herein.
In this specification where a document, act, or item of knowledge is referred to or discussed, this reference or discussion is not an admission that the document, act, or item of knowledge or any combination thereof was, at the priority date, publicly available, known to the public, part of common general knowledge, or otherwise constitutes prior art under the applicable statutory provisions; or is known to be relevant to an attempt to solve any problem with which this specification is concerned.